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Major Depression Resource Center

Using Your Hands to Heal Your Head

A psychiatrist and a hand surgeon say to beat depression, it helps to get your hands dirty.

Carrie and Alton Barron met in medical school. They married and made a life together, but they never expected to work together. She is a psychiatrist and he is a hand surgeon. Their two disciplines would seem to be miles apart.

Then they noticed their patients had something in common: When they were using their hands, their mental health improved.

“People started coming in and talking about activities they had done with their hands over the weekend that had lifted their mood,” Carrie says. She remembers one patient who was struggling with depression: “Something broke in his apartment and he fixed it and he just felt euphoric.”

Alton saw the other side of that equation — people who lost the use of their hands after an injury. He witnessed “the significant mood depression that occurs when people lose the ability to do what they need to do.” He saw that not only in craftspeople who made a living with their hands, but also in ordinary people who could no longer cook a meal or tie their shoes.

Those observations evolved into a book they wrote together and called “The Creativity Cure.” They call it a “prescription” for avoiding and alleviating depression.

They say it is no coincidence that modern people use their hands less than our ancestors, and also experience higher rates of anxiety and depression. More than half of the brain's cortex is mapped to the hands. That’s evidence, Alton says, that our hands need to be engaged for our brains to be healthy.

“Really it’s a form of lifestyle medicine, or preventative medicine,” Carrie says. Alton goes further: This is “a matter of life and death,” he says. “We need to be using our hands to keep stimulating our brains.”

They’re quick to point out that texting doesn’t cut it. “We’re now hunched over our smartphones, texting and typing constantly,” Alton says. “We are technologically supersaturated… and we have to draw that down.” He and Carrie own smartphones, but they make a point to put them away.

Carrie knits, plays guitar and writes longhand every morning. Alton repairs furniture around the house and is even using a chainsaw to carve a bench out of an old oak stump. Together, he and Carrie are weeding a plot of ground at their new home for a vegetable garden. They plan with some friends to initiate garden-to-table Fridays, where they make a meal out of only what they have grown.

They encourage handiwork in their patients as well. When a furniture maker came to Alton after accidentally severing three fingers with a table saw, Alton accepted a custom-made chest as payment.

But they stress you don’t need to be a master craftsperson to get the benefit of using your hands: Fix things rather than replacing them, doodle, cook, make music. “It’s not about the product,” Carrie says. “It is really about the process.”

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